Searching for new, interesting things to do in Boston is a great way to get out of the house, but it can also be time-consuming. Among most local aggregators, volume of events is the objective, not quality. I schedule an hour each Sunday to browsing these events. It's not an activity I really look forward to - it's a manual and tedious process. If the event fits certain criteria (price, relevance, location), it's an event I'd like to attend. If not, skip.

When I thought about the problem formulaically as above, I realized it would be pretty simple to set up as a program. Build a basic front-end that interfaces with a database of events, and a back-end which houses those events and make predictions from my preferences.

I ended up scraping data from The Boston Calendar because it is the best local events aggregator I could find. Once a week, I pull new events for the upcoming week and receive an e-mail asking me to mark events I like. The more events I like, the more the algorithm will learn my preferences and recommend events which better suit my preferences.